The Mind and the Immune System

It’s always struck me as interesting that we know so little about the way our minds work and we also know so little about the way our immune systems work. These two systems are fascinating examples of intelligence. Simply put the mind is a centralised intelligence and the immune system is a distributed intelligence. By that I mean the mind does a lot of processing from relatively few sensors, where as the immune system has many autonomous distributed sensors which each do a little processing, and some centralised areas of control. Both systems have memory and a recognition ability.

However, things get really interesting at the interface of these two highly complex systems. The placebo affect is, perhaps, even less understood than either of the individual systems. There also may be links between auto-immune disease and mental disease and a low mental state is also associated with greater susceptibility to disease.

It is sometimes hard to imagine what people thought in geology before plate tectonics was understood. Of course, this is a totally premature statement, but a discovery like this really feels like it could bring about a corresponding seismic shift in health and the mind.